The Chooky Brae and The Bookie

Both The Chooky Brae and The Bookie are determinedly old fashioned. While DC Jackson’s Chooky sees his dysfunctional family complete their trilogy with a typically uncomfortable Christmas, writer Douglas Maxwell has teamed up with musical wunderkind Aly MacRae for a jazzy musical that reeks of low-life, gangsters and late-night deals. Their respective messages – the family that fights together, stays together and that luck is no random matter – are conservative and almost wilfully optimistic and they avoid too serious contemplations through rapidly paced plots and calculated set-pieces.

The lack of dramatic innovation – perhaps the consequence of designing plays for long tours – forces the cast to hold the audience’s attention. Both plays have strong casts, with The Bookie demanding both dramatic and musical theatre skills. Although the plots are coherent and the characters straight-forward – even verging on caricature – the deeper themes are merely suggestive.

The Chooky Brae meanders through fraudulent disability, infidelity and maternal strength. The Christmas dinner, rather than a time of togetherness and fun, is exposed as a hot-house of seething passions and resentments. Generational conflicts clash with the aftermath of adultery, duty battles desire and the uncertain peace at the end is more a temporary surrender than a permanent cease-fire.

The humour throughout The Chooky is broad – and sometimes obvious – and the dramatic reveal that the father is faking his post-stroke disability is thrown away too easily. The set’s inclusion of a toilet allows for plenty of shit jokes and while the dialogue is snappy, the script relies heavily on simplistic characterisations: the lazy son, the slutty daughter, the neighbouring lothario and the absent father. By never taking itself too seriously, the play is undemanding fun – yet it lacks the soulful depth that could lift it beyond a slow motion version of classic farce.

The Bookie is another family story, and boasts a great soundtrack. In the songs, even if they are occasionally swallowed by the hard-working cast, Maxwell grapples with appearance and reality, the power of luck and the ability of the past to always catch up with even the sleekest gangster. Love eventually comes to the rescue, inevitably, and the ease with which lost love is reconciled, the future made financially rosy and the characters live happily ever after sacrifices plausibility for simple resolution at the end of Act Two.

Like The Chooky, it’s an enjoyable romp, yet it promises much more. Maxwell sporadically reveals his gift for language – the wordplay on “flutter” in the opening number is elegant and provocative – yet seems content to caricature and sacrifice all for plot. His gay character is a flaming stereotype, yet the awkward interactions between the characters hint that Maxwell is capable of exposing human frailty and hope in a more incisive manner.

Both plays are easy-going and humorous, but fail to take their subjects seriously. Neither satire nor tragedy, they are broad comedies, entertaining and well served by good casts, yet lacking the nuance or bite to move beyond solid entertainment.